The book, extended
Blogs
Concepts explained, standards pressure-tested, and market claims answered. The posts follow the book's three acts. ACT I: why the current value system fails. ACT II: how value actually behaves. ACT III: how value is governed into existence. Start with the act that matches your question, jump straight to a topic below, or browse everything. Claims here stay under review; what changes is recorded in The Claims Register. New to the vocabulary? The glossary defines the standard’s terms in one place.
Browse by Topic ▾
Browse by Chapter of the Book ▾
Browse by Role ▾
Most companies have rules for approving a new software charge. Those rules check that the right person signed. They don’t ask what the new feature should deliver, so an added AI feature can be approved with no result anyone can check later.
Ontario’s auditor found errors in notes from all 20 approved AI note-taking systems it reviewed for doctors. The accuracy fixes that followed apply to future purchases; current contracts gained an annual security report.
Maryland’s attorney general’s office renewed a software contract without telling the state board the system was unfinished. The audit’s fixes check deliverables and invoices, and none asks whether the system fit each unit.
Market ratings are getting better at telling buyers which providers deliver. None of them can tell a company whether its own purchase did what it was bought to do.
The Procurement Act 2023 writes termination rights into public contracts that no term can remove. Each is measured against a contract, and none refers to the result the purchase was bought for.
New Zealand’s annual procurement capability report counts how many agencies recorded on-time and on-budget delivery. It has no figure for whether purchases produced their results, and its benefits reporting for significant contracts is paused.
A battery buyers’ alliance published a model contract in which the seller’s performance figures carry no evidential priority over the buyer’s own. Its order of terms is a usable model for software and AI purchases.
When a purchase disappoints, the standard advice is to return to what was promised before the commitment. It only works if someone wrote those promises down in a place the review can find.
Vendors and their partners are building funded programs to define and measure the value their customers get. That is real progress, and it makes the buyer’s own record more important.
Outcome pricing now lets the buyer pick what it pays for, but the count still lives in the vendor’s platform, and the event on the invoice is rarely the result the purchase was approved to produce.